Obituary

George Harrison

By the time that the Beatles released their first No 1 hit, Please Please Me, in February 1963 it was apparent that three members of the group had clearly defined personalities. John Lennon was the most acerbic; Ringo Starr was the joker in the pack; and Paul McCartney, smoothing ruffled feathers, was the public relations man.

Perhaps because of the way he had joined the group, George Harrison, who has died of cancer at the age of 58, was always the quietest Beatle and the least easy to pigeonhole - although he would occasionally surprise journalists with a pithy, off-the-wall remark. However, he was unquestionably the best looking, and certainly the most dapper, with those little collarless jackets, à la Pierre Cardin, sitting comfortably on his shoulders, not a button under pressure.

Harrison's isolation was most noticeable on stage. The Beatles gravitated from church halls in Liverpool and clubs in Hamburg's red light district to a global fame greater than any British performers since Charlie Chaplin, but it was Lennon and McCartney who dominated. The early line-up saw McCartney, Lennon and Harrison strung out stage front, with Starr flailing his drumkit at the back. That style became de rigueur for British groups in the 1960s, but it started to fracture as the Beatles grew more successful.

From 1963 Lennon and McCartney wrote more of the songs, and it became more usual to see their two heads crowding round a single microphone providing lead vocal and back-up or chorus. Harrison, even when he was adding his voice to the mix, seemed stranded at the far side of the stage, even if he was the best musician and the motor of the band.

For the Beatles he designed breaks and riffs. But for himself he lacked - or rarely took - the opportunity to cut loose in the rockabilly style of his American hero, Carl Perkins. With, and without, the Beatles, he was also an underrated songwriter. Something (1969) was a great song - even the Beatles' antithesis, Frank Sinatra, picked up on it - and My Sweet Lord (1970), while unconsciously plagiarised from Lonnie Mack's He's So Fine, justifiably sold in millions.

In 1971 came his New York concert for Bangladesh. That new country had been devastated by war and floods, and the event launched the vogue for rock-celebrity fundraising. It also resulted in a three-volume album, featuring Harrison with Starr, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Ravi Shankar, and put the stamp on Harrison's relationship with India that had begun when he introduced the sitar to the Beatles in the mid-1960s.

The formula with the Beatles was that Harrison got to sing at least one number on each album, beginning with the Lennon and McCartney song Do You Want To Know A Secret? on the group's debut album, Please Please Me. Gradually his own work began to feature. There was Within You Without You, on Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), Here Comes The Sun and Something, on Abbey Road (1969), and While My Guitar Gently Weeps, on The White Album (1968).

The youngest Beatle, Harrison was born in Wavertree, Liverpool, eight months after McCartney, two years after Lennon and three years after Starr. His rock 'n' roll epiphany came in 1956 when he cycled past an open window out of which was wafting Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel.

The son of a bus driver, he was educated at Dovedale primary school, which Lennon had attended, and after passing the 11-plus examination was awarded a place at the Liverpool Institute, one of the city's leading grammar schools. He met McCartney - also at the Institute - on the bus to school. The pair became close friends. When in 1957 McCartney linked up with Lennon in the Quarrymen skiffle group, he tried to persuade them to invite Harrison along. At first Lennon resisted - he did not want a 14-year-old in the band - but relented after hearing Harrison play Bill Justis's rock instrumental, Raunchy.

Lennon realised that having someone who could play guitar solos - and Harrison was already a more competent musician than McCartney or himself - would expand the group's range. The disapproval with which Lennon's guardian, his aunt, Mimi, greeted the new boy's teddy-boy style and thick Scouse accent might also have helped to change his mind.

Harrison's absorption into music took its toll on his school career, and he left the Liverpool Institute in 1959 with only one O-level, in art. By then the Quarrymen had metamorphosed into the Silver Beatles. The following year, and by now the Beatles, they were booked to play for four months in a club on Hamburg's Reeperbahn. The trip was cut short when it was discovered that Harrison, then 17, was underage, but the quintet (as it then was, with Pete Best on drums and Stuart Sutcliffe on guitar) had gelled into an arresting, idiosyncratic unit.

By 1962, and now managed by Brian Epstein, the Beatles had signed their recording contract with EMI. In those simple times, when the group was almost a proto-teeny pop band, fan sheets listed Harrison's pet likes as "hamburgers, the colour purple and friendly girls". When their record producer George Martin asked if there was anything they were unhappy with, Harrison managed: "Yes, I don't like your tie".

Although Harrison was a fine lead guitarist - and his understated work was influential on many later players - his most important influence on the Beatles was undoubtedly the new sound textures he introduced. Chief among these was the sitar.

He had first heard the instrument during the filming of Help! (1965), the second Beatles film. He was intrigued, and the instrument was to feature on the Rubber Soul album, then being recorded at the Abbey Road studios. When a string broke on Harrison's sitar the Indian embassy put him in touch with the Asian Music Circle based in Hampstead, north London. At the home of the circle's co-founder, Patricia Angadi, the Beatles were introduced to Ravi Shankar. Harrison briefly studied with Shankar in order to use the sitar in Beatle music. The two became close friends, touring the United States together in 1974, and Shankar recorded for Dark Horse, the record labelHarrison set up in 1976.

Between 1967 and 1968 Harrison's interest in Indian music led to the group's involvement with transcendental meditation, via the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. When they headed to India Harrison was with his then wife Pattie Boyd - whom he had met on the set of the first Beatles film, A Hard Day's Night (1964), and married in 1966, with McCartney as best man. But the Indian trip was not a success, and although Lennon and Yoko Ono used chanting Hare Krishna followers on their recording of Give Peace A Chance, it was Harrison alone who remained faithful to the Vedic tradition. His ashes are to be scattered in the river Ganges, and he once observed that one of his greatest thrills was seeing members of the London Hare Krishna Temple on television chanting the record he had produced with them.

He donated a mansion outside London for use as a Hindu centre, and played concerts in support of that curious British manifestation, the Natural Law Party, best known for advocating yogic flying as a political panacea. He did, however, turn down the Maharishi's request that he, McCartney and Starr stand for the party in the 1992 general election.

By 1968 the Beatles were on a downward path. McCartney and Lennon were drifting apart, and both had antagonised Harrison, who walked off the set of their documentary, Let It Be (released in 1970), after an argument with McCartney. In March 1969, during a police and media blitz on drugs, youth, politics and rock stars, Harrison and Boyd were fined for possessing cannabis. That August the group were in the recording studios for the last time together, to complete tracks for Abbey Road.

Harrison was the first Beatle to succeed as a solo artist. He had made two albums - Wonderwall Music and Electronic Sound (both 1969), while the group was still together. Then in 1970 he co-produced the double album, All Things Must Pass. It sold 3m copies, and was his most commercially successful record, although a plagiarism suit over the song My Sweet Lord cost him almost $600,000 in the American courts.

He continued to write and record at a fast pace for the next few years, releasing the hit, Give Me Love: Give Me Peace On Earth (1973), and the albums, Living In The Material World (1973) and Extra Texture (1975). By the end of the 1970s the Beatles partnership had been officially dissolved.

Meanwhile Harrison's spiritual soft rock had gone out of fashion, and for much of the next decade he made a new career as a producer with Handmade Films, the company that he had formed in 1979 with Dennis O'Brien. Their first success was Monty Python's The Life Of Brian (1979), which they took on after EMI decided its comic retelling of the life of Jesus might incur charges of blasphemy. In 1980 there was The Long Good Friday, followed by Time Bandits (1981), A Private Function (1985), Mona Lisa (1986) and Withnail And I (1987).

The failure of a Madonna-Sean Penn vehicle, Shanghai Surprise (1986), heralded a downturn in the company's fortunes and it was eventually wound up in acrimony, with Harrison winning a $11m lawsuit against his former partner.

After the murder of John Lennon in 1980, Harrison composed a tribute song, All Those Years Ago, but his own recording career was not properly rekindled until 1987 when he and Jeff Lynne, of the Electric Light Orchestra, co-produced the album Cloud Nine, which included two singles, Got My Mind Set On You and When We Was Fab.

With Lynne he also formed the Traveling Wilburys, a band that included Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty. In 1992 the success of two of the group's albums encouraged Harrison to undertake his first international tour for 18 years.

In the 1980s and 1990s he appeared in public infrequently, usually on Beatle-related occasions. He lived quietly in his 19th century mansion at Friars Park, Henley-on-Thames, with his second wife, Olivia, whom he married in 1978, and their son, Dhani. It was an idyllic life shaken only in December 1999 when a schizophrenic Beatles fan, Michael Abram, broke in and badly injured Harrison. He is survived by Olivia and Dhani.

Dave Laing and Penny Valentine

George Harrison, guitarist, singer, songwriter, born February 25, 1943; died November 29, 2001

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About this article

George Harrison

This article appeared on p15 of the Guardian Weekly section of the Guardian
on Wednesday 5 December 2001.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 07.25 EST on Thursday 6 December 2001.
It was last modified at 05.16 EDT on Tuesday 15 July 2008.
It was first published at 07.25 EST on Wednesday 5 December 2001.